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10
Deadly Web Site Sins
by Jennifer Johnson
WEB
SITE SIN #1: Slow Download Times
You can have a site that provides the best content in the world, but if
it takes forever to download no one will hang around long enough to
view it. As a general rule, the longer it takes your site to download,
the
fewer visitors will stick it out 'til the bitter end to see it. The next
time
you're tempted to take that 8x10 photo of you at age 5 with Bozo and
turn it into a clickable image map, it might be wise pass on it.
When visitors hit your site, they're looking for information, services,
or
products. For the most part, they aren't interested in that cool new
graphic it took you a whole day to create.
So, should you just deliver your information in a text-only, no frills
format? No, of course not. Unless you want to have single digit daily
site traffic.
What you should strive for is a balance between image quality and
image size. There is a happy medium where the image looks good and
the file is small enough that it will download fairly quickly. Your
graphics should enhance the presentation of your information, not
overpower it.
There are several image compression utilities online; NetMechanic
offers GIFBot, a free service which will display several compressed
images and allow you to choose and save the one that best suits your
needs.
Be sure and use the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes of the IMG tag
too!
WEB SITE
SIN #2: Poor Choice of Background and Text Colors
There is nothing more frustrating than going to a site that you feel will
be exactly what you're looking for, only to find that the information is
unreadable due to poor background and text color choices.
I would be hard pressed to ever use anything but black text on a white
background for a business site. Black on white provides the easiest
readability. Save the background GIF of the psychedelic kittens giving
the "peace" sign for your personal page.
If you do choose to stray from black on white, make sure that there is
enough contrast between your text and background colors so that
your visitors will not have trouble reading your content. You also have
to take into consideration that they must be able to read the links and
visited links against the background color. You can always change the
link colors, but I don't particularly like to do that myself. People know
what the default colors mean and if you introduce new ones, they have
to figure out which color stands for what.
Keep in mind that if you have a dark background tile and you've
specified a light color text, your content might not be readable for
visitors who are surfing with image-loading OFF depending on their
default browser background color. To get around this, specify a
background color in addition to a background image, like so:
<BODY BGCOLOR="#800080" BACKGROUND="deeppurplesilk.gif"
TEXT="#FFFFFF>
WEB SITE
SIN #3: The Evil "BLINK!"
Oh, this is a big one. Please have some consideration for us and don't
use blinking text on your page! Believe me, people just don't like it.
To me, there is nothing more distracting than trying to read and having
that incessant blinking going on. It's like standing beside the man in
line at McDonald's who is carrying on a heated debate with his
imaginary parrot, Pepé - you don't want to look, but your eyes keep
getting drawn to the horrible spectacle.
I'll also include those annoying little animated GIFs in this category.
A
few eons ago, they might have been new and fresh, but if I see one
more of those little animated workers laboring inside an "Under
Construction" sign, I think I'm going to yak (I used one of those at one
time myself, sigh...).
Don't get me wrong, I think it's OK to sprinkle a few good animations
here and there throughout your site. You run into problems when
you've got 20 or so animated Smurfs doing the Macarena on one page.
These have the same distracting effect as blinking text. Just when you
start to concentrate and absorb the reading material, the dancing
purple ferret can't stand it anymore and has to bust a move. He stops,
you regain your focus, and guess what? "Hey, check me out again" -
"Whoa! you didn't think I was through already, did ya?" - "Look at
me!!! You Gotta Love me!! .
WEB SITE
SIN #4: Frames
Ah yessss....my old nemesis. I detest frames. I think they are the bane
of every web surfer's existence.
Please don't e-mail me and try to brainwash me into your twisted way
of thinking. I don't like frames. Let me rephrase that: in theory, they
sound like a great tool; in practice, they are usually anything but. Yes,
frames could provide a very convenient navigation system for a site,
but most of the time they don't.
Invariably, the dimensions are just a hair off and you are stuck with
that dastardly horizontal scrollbar. Or you have a window
approximately 5 pixels high to try to scroll. Sometimes your screen is
so hacked up, if you didn't know better, you might think a samurai had
taken out his frustration on a lemon meringue pie.
Not to mention the fact that frames can cause a problem for some
search engines in indexing your site.
WEB SITE SIN #5:
The Endlessly Scrolling Page
You load a page, you watch in horror as the button on the scrollbar
gets smaller and smaller - it would make a dust mite feel like a huge,
lumbering, oaf. When the page is finally finished loading, you pull out
your handy electron microscope and discover that, yes, the scrollbar is
still there, all five nanometers of it. This is when it dawns on you:
Brother, you've got a long way to go to get to the bottom of this page.
Have you ever stumbled upon a page that seemed to go on and on
forever? It's better to break your content up into short to medium
length, linked pieces instead of one long page. Granted, it's easier to
put everything on one page, but it's really a pain to have to scroll for
days while reading.
One of my friends found a site that was filled with great information,
but when she decided to print it out she discovered that it would have
been several hundred pages long!
WEB
SITE SIN #6: "This Site is Under Construction!"
It's a real simple concept folks...if it isn't finished, don't list it.
I'm not talking about one section under development; that's acceptable
to me and I think to most other people. When you submit your site to all
the search engines and haven't completed anything but the home page,
you've got a problem.
It irritates people; they won't bookmark your site and return in a few
weeks just because they liked the cool graphics you had.
A second cousin to "The Evil BLINK!" is the animated "Under
Construction" sign. Do we really need this? Isn't it kinda obvious when
parts of a site are incomplete?
Most good sites are perpetually "under construction" anyway; it's more
or less an unspoken law.
WEB SITE
SIN #7: Background Sound
In my book, another big no-no for professional sites.
Background sounds are more appropriate for a personal page, don't you
think? It's important that you present a professional image for your
business site.
The ol' credibility meter starts veering towards "EMPTY" when you
subject your visitors to the midi version of The Scrounge hounds latest
single.
If you feel absolutely compelled to make your visitors submit to this
cruel and unusual punishment, please don't make it LOOP indefinitely.
WEB SITE
SIN #8: Inconsistent Design/Layout
I feel that on a business site, the design/layout/navigational items
should be kept consistent throughout the site.
Have you ever visited a site and clicked a link and then wondered if you
were still at the same site or if you had moved on to a different one?
I would recommend using the same background and navigational items
(in the same location, too) on every page throughout the site.
It may sound boring, but it should make it much easier for your visitors
to find their way around.
Making your visitors click on a flaming, green skull on one page to go
"BACK" and on Rudolf's red nose on another page to do the same thing
won't win you any popularity contests.
WEB SITE
SIN #9: Designing for a Specific Browser/Color
Setting/Screen Resolution
I've got an idea...I'm going to make my site totally inaccessible to 25%
of
my visitors!!
Sound crazy? It is. Unfortunately, that is exactly what many site
designers do.
Oh, the percentage is completely arbitrary, but it's commonplace to see
a
site is very difficult, if not impossible, for select groups to enjoy.
I'm a firm believer in not making sites browser specific. Not everyone
downloads the latest, greatest version of MSIE or Netscape - why make
your site only enjoyable for those who do?
I'm not saying you should design for browsers so old they can only read
hieroglyphics, but don't go to the opposite end of the spectrum and
design only for people who upgrade their browsers every night before
bed.
Along the same lines, don't design for a specific color setting. While
your images may look great at 16 or 32 bit color, at 256 color they might
look as if they have been beat with an ugly stick.
Last, but not least, in this category is my personal pet peeve. Don't
design for a specific screen resolution.
Not all of us have a monitor that would dwarf a small barn. If you design
for over 800x600, I would venture a guess that visitors have often
fantasized about the untimely demise of your site.
In my experience, the large majority of people have their screen res at
800x600. That's not from any poll or study, that is based on the visitors
to my sites. But, again in my experience, there are a significant number
of
people who still run 640x480. I, myself, am among them. Sure, I could go
higher, but with my bat-like vision I prefer to use that setting.
Do you know why you shouldn't design specifically for the larger screen
res settings? It creates a horizontal scrollbar for those of us who have
the lower setting selected.
My friend, if you've never experienced a horizontal scrollbar, thank your
lucky stars. There is nothing more infuriating than having to read, scroll
a little to the right, read, scroll down, read, scroll a little to the
right, read,
scroll down....you get the picture, don't you?
WEB SITE
SIN #10: Spelling and HTML Mistakes
Few things will convey a more unprofessional image than spelling or
HTML errors.
Building trust is an absolute must online. If your page is riddled with
spelling and grammatical errors, what kind of message do you think that
sends potential clients?
"There is no more qualified company to handle all you're business
needs"...think again, kid.
HTML goofs are another way to quickly evaporate any faith the visitor
might have had in your ability. This seems painfully obvious, but you
should realize this is especially true if you are offering web site design
services.
If you've left out your ending </B> tag and 3/4 of your page is in BOLD
text, it's really looking bad for you from the get-go.
The strange thing is that these types of mistakes are relatively easy to
avoid.
One obvious step to take would be to proofread your pages before
uploading them. You should also perform spell checking on them or get
a friend to proofread them if that's not your specialty.
I hope this article has helped trigger some ideas for ways to improve
your site. If you are a die hard advocate of some of these techniques,
please don't take offense; these are only my opinions.
Good luck with your site!
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Here is a
little more info that might help:
Frames
Framed sites can
be invisible to search engines spiders. The spiders that cannot follow
frame links never see the content pages that human visitors see. They only
see the frameset page itself. The best answer to this problem is to redesign
your site without using frames. If that is not possible you can have your
Webmaster add information to the frameset page to make it more search engine
friendly. Since the frameset is treated just like an HTML page your Webmaster
should add meta tags and a title to the frameset page. Additionally, descriptive
text can be included in a "No Frames" tag. This tag is intended for older
browsers that do not support frames, but it is also visible to spiders
when they are confronted with a frameset.
More
on Frames, click here!
Flash Animation
and Graphic Text
Search engines use
the text on your page for their ranking determinations. If your site is
filled with Flash animation or if your text appears as a graphic the search
engine spider will not see it. Rich media enhancements like flash look
good to human visitors but they are invisible to search engine spiders.
To improve your chances for good ranking stick with simpler pages without
the flashy animation. If your site has fancy graphics in place of text
be sure to have your Webmaster put another version on the wording in the
"Alt Image" tag.
Dynamically Generated
Pages
A problem with many
e-commerce sites is that their product pages are dynamically generated.
Most search engines do not recognize the "?" and "&" characters that
separate CGI variables. This means that some individual product pages will
not be crawled by search engine spiders. One way to prevent this problem
is to create static versions of your site's dynamic pages for search engines
to crawl. Another option is to use the Dynamic Page Optimization Solutions
available for ASP, ColdFusion, CGI/Perl, or the Apache Web Server. |
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